Writing

Based on cognitive linguist George Lakoffâ??s notions of metaphor and frame as the principle organizers of political discourse, this article offers an approach to analyzing political rhetoric in videogames intended to carry ideological bias. I then argue for three ways games function in relation to ideological frames — reinforcement, contestation, and exposition — through examples of political games (Tax Invaders),… read more

One of the unique properties of video games is their ability to put us in someone elseâ??s shoes. But most of the time, those shoes are bigger than our own. When we play video games, we are like children clopping around in their parentâ??s loafers or pumps, imagining what it would be like to see over the kitchen counter. As… read more

Read the entire article in print in The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto The Grand Theft Auto videogame series puts the player in large, semi-realistic urban environments. Despite their apparent credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather remixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular cultureâ??s notions of real American cities. Locality, the sense of… read more

At E3 2006, the U.S. Army hosted a spectacle of military excess outside the L.A. Convention Centerâ??s South Hall, in promotion of the new Special Forces edition of their popular title Americaâ??s Army. As part of this spectacle, they offered passersby the opportunity to pose holding a large assault rifle next to a camouflaged special forces operative and a Hum-V.… read more

I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the… read more

Electronic games are growing rapidly as a cultural form, a set of media technologies, and a global industry. Humanists are looking at games as a new expressive genre like drama, opera, or movies, social scientists are examining them as a new form of collective behavior, computer scientists, engineers, and industrial designers are finding them a new focus of invention. New… read more

Recently videogames that use physical input devices have been dubbed â??exergamesâ? â?? games that combine play and exercise. This paper offers a historical perspective on exergames, from early arcades to the Atari 2600 through contemporary consoles, as well as a theoretical analysis of the different rhetorics such games deploy to influence players toward physically-active gameplay.

This article explores comparative criticism and videogame software development through thef igure of the bricoleur, the handyman who assembles units of preexisting meaning to form new structures. An intersection of these two domains — what the author calls comparative videogame criticism –suggests a more intimate interrelation between criticism and production. The author offers a critique of functionalist approaches to videogame… read more

The Games for Health 2005 conference, produced by the Serious Games Initiative, was held last week on Sept. 22 and 23 in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference’s content focuses on serious games as used specifically in health and health sciences, including games used for training students in healthcare-related studies as well as games used for treating patients. Ian Bogost, a researcher… read more

Some 30 years ago, the first wave of personal computers spawned a surge of interest in programming education, especially in getting children to program. At the Xerox Palo Alto Research (PARC) group, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg proposed an environment in which anyone could program simulations (Kay & Goldberg 1977). Using their object-oriented Smalltalk language, Kay and Goldberg argued that… read more